Despite Zimbabwe’s efforts to modernize its infrastructure and enhance its economic growth, the mismatch between its industry needs and the skillset possessed by its graduates continues to hinder its progress. This is due to the weak collaboration between industry and academia. Therefore, there is a need for significant transformation in the engineering education. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the engineering education landscape in Zimbabwe, aimed at promoting industry-academia partnerships and evaluation of the progress made by initiatives such as Education 5.0 since their inception. The findings shows that 59% of the respondents are not satisfied with the lecturing methodologies being used in engineering universities and 63% believe that weak policy frameworks are being used to promote collaboration between universities and the industry. One of the main challenges that impede engineering education is inadequate sponsorship towards research and development by the government and industry. This leads to lack of resources such as inadequate laboratory equipment, therefore inadequate practical implementation of theoretical concepts, limited learning capabilities, poor quality engineering education, and mismatch between the curriculum and industry relevance. Moreover, 57% have not yet observed any significant change in engineering education in Zimbabwe in the recent years. This implies that Education 5.0 has not yet made significant progress since its introduction. The study recommends that the industry must provide structured internship and graduate development programs, on top of contributing towards curriculum development of engineering programs.

Keywords

Engineering, Curriculum development, Engineering education, Education 5.0, Industry-academia partnership